Tag - Unity

So, Adobe finally did the inevitable, and announced that they've given up trying to
make Flash relevant on mobile devices. Plenty has been written already
about what lead to this situation, and the "tech" blogosphere certainly has
proved their lack of insight in matters of development again, so maybe I won't
go there. Flash plugin has a bad rap, and HTML5 will share that status as soon
as adware crap starts to be made with it. It's not the tech, but its
application.

However, that misses the big picture as well. Choosing any tech today for
the purpose of building games for Web is deciding a future course by the
back-view mirror. Web, as it is today, is about a 500M connected, actively used
devices market. Sure, more PCs have been sold, and about that many are sold
both this and next year, but the total number of devices sold doesn't matter -
the number of people using them for anything resembling your product (here,
games) does. So, I'll put a stake in the ground at 500M.

In comparison - iPad and other tablets reach about 100M devices this year,
and projections look like about as much more next year. I would argue that most
of them will be used for casual entertainment, at least some of their active
time. That makes tablet-class devices (large touchscreen, no keyboard, used on
a couch or other gaming-friendly situations) a significant fraction of the Web
market already, and that will only be growing going forward.

Mobiles are a class of their own. Several billion devices already, maybe
about a billion of them smart phones, some projections claim another billion
smart phone-class devices to be sold next year. Just by limiting the market to
only those devices which sport installable apps, touch screens, significant
processing power (think iPhone and Android devices, possibly excluding
lowest-end Android and the iPhone 1.0 and 3G), you're still looking at a
potential market of 1 billion devices or so. Now, phones are not in my book
very gaming-friendly - the screen is small, touch controls obscure parts of it,
play sessions are very short, the device spends most time in a pocket and
rarely gets focused attention, and play can be interrupted by many, many
things. Still, as we've seen, great games and great commercial success can be
created on the platform.

However, lets not pretend that a Web game could ever have worked on either a
tablet or a phone without significant effort, both technical and conceptual.
The platforms' underlying assumptions simply are too different.

So, how would you go about choosing a technology for creating a game for the
future, instead of the past?

The choices are:

Native, writing for iOS only. Decent tools, except when they don't work,
one platform, though a relatively large one with customer base proven to be
happy to spend on apps.

Native, writing for iOS and Android. Perhaps for Windows Phone too, if that
takes off. Welcome to niche markets or fragmentation hell.

Native, but with a cross-platform middleware that makes porting easier.
Still, you're probably dealing with low-level crap on a daily basis.

HTML5, if you're willing to endure an unstable, changing platform, more
fragmentation, dubious performance, and frankly, bad tools. Things will be
different in a couple of year's time, I'm sure, but today, that's what it's
really like. I would do HTML5 for apps, but not for games, because that way
you'll get to leverage the best parts of web and skip on the hairiest
client-side issues. In theory you'll also get Web covered, but in practice,
making anything "advanced" work on even one platform is hard work.

AIR, if you continue to have faith that Adobe will deliver. In theory, this
is great: a very cross-platform tech, you can apply some of the same stuff on
Web too, get access to most features on most platforms on almost-native level,
performance is not bad at all, and so on. Except in practice HW-accelerated 3D
actually isn't available on mobile platforms, its cousin Flash was managed to
oblivion, and perhaps most crucially, Adobe's business is serving
ad/marketing/content customers, not developers. I keep hoping, but the facts
aren't encouraging. For now though, you'd base your tech on a great Web
platform with a reasonable conversion path to a mobile application, caveats in
mind.

Unity, if you're happy with the 3D object-oriented platform and tools.
You'll get to create installable games on all platforms, but lets face it: you
will give up Web, because Unity's plugin doesn't have a useful reach. Here, the
success case makes you almost entirely tables/mobile, with PC distribution (in
the form of an installable app, not a Web game) less than a rounding error.
This is probably what you'd be looking for in just a few years time anyway,
even if today it looks like a painful drawback.

Conclusion: Working on tools? HTML5. Web game for the next 2 years? Flash
11. Mobile game? Unity, if its 3D model fits your concept. AIR if not, though
you'll take a risk that Adobe further fumbles with the platform and never gets
AIR 3 with Stage3D enabled on mobile devices out the door. Going native is a
choice, of course, but one that exceeds my personal taste for masochism.

On the upside, Unity is actively doing something to expand their market,
including trying to make Unity games run on top of Flash 11 on PC/Mac, so in
theory you might be getting the Web distribution as a bonus. Making code
written for Mono (.NET/C#/whatever you want to call it) run on the AS3/AVM
Flash runtime is not an easy task though, so consider it a bonus, not a
given.

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